Further thoughts on the German Grand Prix

Strike averted
Thus the German Grand Prix happened, and it was a good one. But for a time there was a possibility that it wouldn’t happen at all, or at least there was a threat of that.

On the Thursday before the race the Grand Prix Drivers' Association (GPDA) issued a statement promising to boycott if the tyre failures that were such an unwelcome presence at Silverstone were repeated this weekend. I have a lot of sympathy with the drivers' position, after all it is their lives on the line, both if they experience a tyre blow out themselves, or find large pieces of tyre debris fly towards them at 200 mph as was the case so harrowingly a week ago. So undoubtedly the drivers had right on their side.

Bernie Ecclestone - gets his own way

But equally, I couldn’t see a boycott materialising, and mainly because history suggests that at such moments getting such action to hold is next to impossible. In short, for various reasons drivers struggle to stick together when the chips are down.

Time was when driver power, and the GPDA, did have such clout. Both the 1969 and 1971 Belgian Grands Prix, at the fearsome original Spa, were cancelled after the GPDA refused to attend on safety grounds. Similarly, the 1970 German Grand Prix was moved from the Nurburgring to Hockenheim as major safety work was done on the Nordschleife. There were earlier examples of driver power winning the day too.

But in the course of a late April weekend in 1975 that all changed. Again, drivers had right on their side, as then all turned up to the Spainsh Grand Prix in Montjuic to find the crash barriers in woeful condition. But in effect the drivers' bosses, spooked by the threat of legal action from the organisers, barged in on where the drivers were assembled and ordered them into their cars. And almost all of them did as they were told. That was the day that the constructors and the organisers won, and probably driver power has never been the same since.

German GP Report: Seb's Bull triumphs in the Ring

On days like today you can't help but wonder why there yet remain those who doubt Sebastian Vettel's potential. Those that say he's just a gazelle, capable of running by himself when all is easy, or that his success is purely a function of Adrian Newey's design genius. It's not clear what their number is but at the very least they seem to shout loud. It's also not clear if they're watching the same F1 races as the rest of us. Yet perhaps it's true what they say: the less they know the more stubbornly they know it.

Sebastian Vettel triumphed under pressure
Credit: Morio / CC

Today's Nurburgring win was not the work of a gazelle. There may have been faster cars over the duration of today's German Grand Prix than Seb's Red Bull. Certainly for most of the way he drove under pressure, with opponents never far behind. Various varying strategies among his challengers swirled all the while like sharks in a pool. And in the late laps the pressure ratcheted up further, with none other than Kimi Raikkonen closing down on him at a rate of knots, benefitting from fresher and softer Pirelli boots. Despite everything, in an exercise that appeared akin to spinning plates, Seb remained in a net first place throughout. And he was still there at the end.

There wasn't the slightest error from him for the duration, nor did there seem to be the slightest possibility of one. It was a masterful performance, and Seb was justified in sounding delighted afterwards, and not just because it was his first win at home and it extends his championship lead after his Silverstone gearbox misfortune.

Nurburgring Qualifying: Just like last week

Lewis Hamilton struggles in practice. He bemoans the car's handling. It looks like his team mate will lead the way for Mercedes as we enter qualifying. But yet, when we reach the important hour Lewis blitzes everyone and snatches pole. Sound familiar? Yes it should. It happened last week in Silverstone. And it happened again in the Nurburgring today.

We really should know better than to write the prodigious Lewis off. His is one of those talents that means pulling rabbits out of the hat is always a possibility. And so it was today, 'taming the wild bull' of his Merc (to use his words from last week) and beating the nearest challenge by a clear tenth of a second to thus ensure he'll start tomorrow's Grand Prix from the front. Not for nothing he described it as 'really overwhelming'.

Just like a week ago, Lewis Hamilton emerged from
struggle to claim pole
Credit: Morio / CC

'I've been struggling since the first run in P1, which was pretty good.' said Lewis, 'P2, P3 were just disasters and it got even worse this morning. We were miles off...I wasn't comfortable with the car at all. We went back into the truck and we just worked hard...made lots and lots of changes and I just hoped that it would work. Fortunately (in qualifying) the car was beneath me...'

It was a qualifying session full of surprises, with an increase in track temperature seemingly changing things and drawing the pack together. Broadly speaking the order, Lewis aside, was as expected, but things were much closer than was anticipated. And this caught out Nico Rosberg's side of the garage most egregiously. Despite his being right in the front-running mix, he dropped out before Q3, someone making the decision to not go for an additional run at the end of the second session. This confines him to start 11th instead, with much to do.

Nurburgring Preview: Unknown leap in tepid surroundings

So, this weekend F1 cars race around the Nurburgring. Only they don't. Not for anyone with much reverence of the sport's history, anyway.

Because what we have now isn't the Nurburgring. The Nurburgring is a fearsome and torturous 22.8km challenge. It is Flugplatz, Bergwerk, Karussell. It has 89 left-handers and 85 right, 300 metres of elevation change, and is surrounded by deadly trees and bushes, which also serve to make most of the corners blind ones. It is where many of the sport's gladiators of the past did battle, sorted the great from the good, teased death and in some cases succumbed to it. This is not what F1 drivers will face this weekend.

The original Nurburgring
Credit: BUICK REGAL / CC

Don't get me wrong, there's not a great deal wrong with the new Ersatzring that is used by the contemporary sport. In itself it's perfectly tolerable albeit in a modern and sanitised way. But that's it: it doesn't stir the senses as the Nurburgring should.

F1 of course abandoned the original 'Ring after Niki Lauda's harrowing fiery accident in 1976 which scarred and very nearly killed him; the elapse of time for assistance to reach the stricken Austrian on the lengthy circuit being the particular show-stopper.

Eight years later, the sport returned to the 'neu' Nurburgring, and were generally bewildered by what they found. Unlike the new Spa which had been completed a handful of years before it, it did not retain any of its elder sibling's character, not did it use any of the old track. Contrary to some of the suggestions made in advance, it didn't use any of the equally-magnificent Südschleife either; instead that was trampled underneath the new creation.

Further thoughts on the British Grand Prix

Not like the rest of us

'The danger? Well, of course. But you are missing a very important point. I think if any of us imagined - really imagined - what it would be like to go into a tree at 150 miles per hour we would probably never get into the cars at all, none of us. So it has always seemed to me that to do something very dangerous requires a certain absence of imagination.'

The words of a Grand Prix driver? Yes. Well, sort of. It's actually from Jean-Pierre Sarti, one of the protagonists in the 1966 John Frankenheimer film Grand Prix.

But clearly his words apply to F1 reality, and indeed still apply today. The latest evidence of this was on Sunday.

Fernando Alonso - reminding us not
just anyone can be an F1 driver
Credit: formulasantander.com / CC

After the first three tyre failures early in the Silverstone race several drivers received radio messages advising them to keep clear of the kerbs in order to minimise the chances of a further tyre failure for themselves. Nevertheless much kerb-riding could be seen throughout the field for the race's remainder.

Fernando Alonso for one made no bones about the fact that he didn't heed the call for caution from his pit wall: 'They kept telling me to go off the kerbs, but obviously if you’re position 12 you need to attack, you need to change the racing line, you need the use the DRS...I didn’t change, I didn’t change lines.' And, judging from the lines most of his rivals continued to take after the first round of tyre failures, Alonso was far from the only one.

Further thoughts on the British Grand Prix

Hard to make it in the rain
As we know by now, F1's ability to make itself look foolish at regular intervals is rather well-established. And in the Silverstone weekend its manifestation didn't even start and end with tyre failures, the opening Friday practice session also resulted in a degree of cringing. The wet weather - combined with unintended consequences of various F1 cost-cutting measures - ensured that, while the sport's paying customers in attendance were rained on, they didn't even have anything to entertain them as there was only an empty track to look at for the most part. It took a full 76 minutes of the 90 minute session for the first laptime to be set.

I got angry at it all at the time (see my article on the matter on F1Plus.com), but on reflection perhaps solving it, at least without creating even worse unintended consequences, is easier said than done. The F1 rule book is much more house of cards than steel structure - it can be brought tumbling down rather easily.

Nico Rosberg - explaining why wet
practice running is difficult
Credit: Alex Comerford / CC

Later that day the FIA announced a number of regulation changes for F1 from next year, including that an extra set of tyres will be available to each driver for the first 30 minutes of FP1, in order to encourage more track running then. Nico Rosberg, while expressing sympathy for the fans, doubted however that an extra set of tyres would have made a difference to Silverstone's sparse action: 'I felt it was a bit disappointing for the fans today, they pay a lot of money and come here and then we don’t run. So it would be worth looking into that, yes. But what to do? I don't know, because we already have that extra set of tyres as it is.'

Rosberg further sought to explain why it was in the competitors' interests to not run: 'It's just the fact that we don’t really want to risk things going out in the wet because it's going to be dry all weekend. And even things like engine degradation, we have only a very very limited amount of engines for the whole season, and any extra laps that we do we lose power because they degrade inside, so you don’t want to do any useless laps on the engine either. That’s just some examples why we then choose not to run.'

Further thoughts on the British Grand Prix

Kimi's in
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And this applies to the weird world of F1 as much as it does anything. Matters tend not to be dwelt upon; no sooner does something happen than all look ahead to what the implications will be. And so it was with Mark Webber's Silverstone announcement that he's off to sportscars next year, before you knew it focus shifted to who would plug the Aussie Grit-shaped hole at Red Bull (though for various reasons for a while almost no one had expected him to still be there next year anyway). And sure enough the Bulls' boss Christian Horner quickly stated that there are three candidates: the two Toro Rosso pilots - Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne - and Kimi Raikkonen.

Kimi Raikkonen - in a
perhaps not inappropriate hat
Credit: Matthias v.d. Elbe / CC

But perhaps the fun speculating about it all will be short-lived, as the momentum behind Kimi to fill the Red Bull vacancy already looks unstoppable. Conspicuously, no one is denying anything, and moreover the key players are making noises which indicate considerable movement down the Kimi to Red Bull path. Lotus's Eric Boullier admitted in the team principals' press conference at Silverstone that 'Red Bull is chasing Kimi'. And Horner in the same room didn't make effort to downplay it in response, commenting that 'Kimi Raikkonen is a driver you would be foolish to ignore', before going onto make noises that he wants to 'pick the best candidate for that role' and elsewhere that 'we want the fastest line-up that we can'. All roads lead to Kimi you'd have thought, being by far the most qualified available candidate in the here and now, and even the Ice Man himself has admitted to there being talks with the Milton Keynes team. Indeed, paddock gossip had Kimi to Red Bull as a done deal already.

And it's one of those moves that no matter how far you dig it's hard to discover any show-stoppers: the temptations of a Red Bull to Kimi are obvious, given that the car has been the sport's gold standard for a number of years. From Red Bull's perspective the temptations of Kimi are obvious too: the Finn has established himself as one of the very best and most reliable F1 drivers in the contemporary age, and surely in a Red Bull he'd be good both for wins and for consistent points in chasing the constructors' title. Kimi you feel further fits the Red Bull brand perfectly; indeed he was sponsored by the company in his rallying sojourn. Of course, a potential impediment would be what Luca Montezemolo called 'two roosters in the same hen house' resultant from pairing Kimi with Sebastian Vettel, but among the top drivers surely Kimi represents the lowest risk of all on this front, given his firmly apolitical and equanimous attitude. Further, while some have claimed that Vettel could veto the move, you'd imagine that had Seb not given it all his blessing it would never have been allowed to get this far (and, given the lingering existence of Seb-doubters, just perhaps Seb's keen to prove himself alongside him?). As for the Toro Rosso two, harsh though it sounds (but hey F1 is a harsh business) it's hard to argue that either pilot has made a consistent case for the step up - not yet anyway. And in any case Red Bull clearly feels no obligation to promote from within. To borrow Sherlock Holmes's maxim: eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Further thoughts on the British Grand Prix

Why I'll miss Mark Webber
It was overshadowed somewhat by the time the race had ended, but early in the Silverstone weekend the talk of the town was Mark Webber confirming that this year will be his last in F1, as he's off to drive for Porsche in sportscars from 2014. It's wrong to call it a retirement; he'll still very much be active in LMP1 which is a formula on an upward curve right now. And while the man himself is clearly content with his decision I for one cannot help but feel a tinge of regret at his loss to F1.

Mark Webber will be missed
Credit: Rich Jones / CC

Part of this is that drivers of Webber's quality are not two-a-penny. While even the man himself would likely admit that he is not consistently of the quality of an Alonso, a Hamilton, a Vettel, he certainly isn't far off, and very much is at the top of the next tier of talent. And as we know there are those occasional weekends when Webber is really on form and then absolutely no one can live with him - not even the haughty names I mentioned. We can recall such days: Germany in 2009, his debut win; Spain and Monaco in 2010; Silverstone last year, and indeed his aggressive drive last weekend at the same venue was very much among them, rising from P13 nearly to win.

But the main reason I'll miss Mark Webber is to do with his personality. To borrow from something Martin Brundle says from time-to-time, racing drivers these days have a rather atypical, perhaps even a rather sheltered, existence and from an early age: in most cases they've never sat in a job interview or gone through any of the other character-building experiences that the rest of us do. And perhaps it shows: while my admiration of anyone good enough to get into F1 is extreme, perhaps the situation I've outlined contributes to something of an overgrown child personality manifesting among them a lot of the time.

Further thoughts on the British Grand Prix

No one emerges with credit
'You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.'

No, these are not the words of Paul Hembery - rather they were uttered by Rahm Emanuel, currently Mayor of Chicago - but they could have been. They're very apt.

It probably seemed impossible at the time, but at least some good has come of the British Grand Prix last weekend. It's whipped the notoriously difficult to herd F1 fraternity into order, in-season tyre testing to help Pirelli is to come back, first at the Young Drivers' Test and possibly at Brazil too, as well as that changes to the tyres are to be made incrementally in the next two rounds.

Adrian Newey - wide of the mark
Credit: Morio / CC

I've noticed however a certain amount of finger pointing at three teams - Ferrari, Lotus and Force India - who'd sought to minimise the changes before now, including the two changes to the tyres that we've now ended up with: reintroduction of the Kevlar belt and having 2013 compounds with 2012 tyre construction. Surprisingly, such finger pointing has also come from Red Bull's Adrian Newey - I say 'surprisingly' as Newey's public comments are usually considered, even-handed. But in this case he said: 'It's a sad state of affairs but such is the nature of Formula 1, really. It's been fairly clear that there's been a number of worrying tyre failures through the year. Pirelli came up with a solution for that, with a different construction, and that was being offered initially for Montreal. But two or three teams vetoed that because they were worried it would suit some other teams more than it would suit them. As a result of that short-sightedness, Formula 1 ended up putting up the worrying performance it did and concerns about driver safety.'

British GP Report: The best of times, the worst of times

I suppose it shows the importance of getting the full picture. On one level, yesterday's British Grand Prix was an exciting and eventful one. It had battles up and down the field that you couldn't avert your eyes from. And it featured an exciting finish with one fine hardy driver chasing down another for the win in the final corners.

And yet that's not even the start of it. Those facts outlined in the opening paragraph you feel will be far from top of mind when the 2013 British Grand Prix is recalled, at least in the days and weeks to come.

Pirelli once again was the centre of attention
Credit: Rich Jones / CC

And the matter is a familiar one: yes, dear reader, it's all about tyres. In the Silverstone race there were repeated tyre failures, nay explosions, for competitor after competitor. First leader Lewis Hamilton's rear left tyre went, then Felipe Massa's, then Jean-Eric Vergne's. And with each failure the sense of trepidation, the sense that we were entering some kind of nightmare, increased. Later Sergio Perez's left rear was to go too, and in between times the front left tyre of Esteban Gutierrez failed in similar style. They of course also followed from a close to identical failure for Perez in Saturday morning's practice session.

The debris strewn after the first three failures resulted in a safety car, and never in my life did I think I would ever be so reluctant to see green flag racing subsequently. The threat of further failure left a haunting chill over proceedings, all with uncomfortable reminiscence of Indianapolis in 2005, one of the darkest hours in a sport not short of dark hours.

As it was, the race was completed and one way or another we got away with it. But it could have been much worse: Nico Rosberg and Fernando Alonso both stated after the race that they had tyre failures too just before pitting, Sebastian Vettel's tyres from the first stint were also found with cuts. More pointedly, no one was hurt in any of the failures, and in particular Perez's failure which took in front of several cars - the Mexican's McLaren squirming at 200mph and all sorts of rubber being spat behind - could easily have resulted in carnage akin to a plane crash. For a time as failure followed failure a red flag was a genuine possibility, confirmed by Race Director Charlie Whiting later. If that had happened it would have ranked right up there in the sport's most inauspicious moments.